Tracking sports player development over a time period has been known to be a difficult task. Tracking a variety of different metrics can help coaches and trainers better tailor the training and lifestyle of the athlete to ensure performance growth in the athlete. A variety of different systems to track player performance are known. For example, some coaches keep performance attribute data primarily in the form of handwritten notes. This approach is disadvantageous because the data is not readily available to the athlete, the athlete's parents (in the case of minors), trainers, team managers, sponsors, and/or other stakeholder's associated with the developing athlete. In professional sports, rankings and statistics are often managed and hosted by large media outlets. However, for amateur players wishing to become professional, player development data is often only found in basic forms often on webpages and blogs. This creates an inherent drawback for younger players and trainers.
Furthermore, because media typically maintain and manage player records, such player records are typically outside of the control of a player and his or her trainer. Furthermore, such player records are also typically only managed for competition-related occurrences, because media typically does not monitor sporting performance in non-competition practice scenarios, or for non-professional athletes.
In particular contexts, ball games are very popular and tennis in particular has become one of the major popular and professional sports. For the non-professional tennis players there are several ways of improving their game. Training with a tennis coach, self-training by using a ball machine or a return-wall, books and videos all improve mainly the technical skills. Tactical coaching however is not available for the nonprofessional player, although many matches are decided by tactical competence rather than by technical skills. A professional player enjoys the advantages of a personal coach who follows the match, takes notes and videos of the different situations during a match and discusses his findings with the player. The importance of this data has been known for a long time, so recording player's data on handwritten sheets is still in use by many professionals, as well as coaches or other skilled people.
By way of contrast, such levels of support are not typically available to a non-professional player. These handwritten notes are kept by the individual coach, but in an academy for younger players, this information needs to be shared with other individuals focused on the player's education, sponsorship, parents, and the academy itself.
During the last 10 years, more and more electronic devices have come onto the market allowing for us to improve the manual collection of data. Hand held devices such as pocket computers or laptops with commercially available software gives the possibility to trainers to enter data and to show match statistics as shown during TV coverage of tennis games, providing basic information such as break points won or unforced forehand errors. These statistics are useful for a professional but are not precise enough to help in the training process of an amateur sport player in his path to becoming professional. Therefore such electronic devices and software are only of limited usefulness for the non-professional player wanting to improve his game and become professional.
Information about the game is another area where professional sports and non-professional sports, and in particular tennis matches, differ enormously. In professional sports the spectators are informed by a large amount of information provided by the media with the ranking and results of the players updated by the staff of the tournament. In non-professional tennis, even during tournaments, the players have to take and display the scores by themselves, by mechanical or digital devices, usually during the change of sides after two games. Usually only the statistics of the final games won are recorded. For sponsors who do not continuously follow the match they are not informed about the actual score or details of the results of the player. Thus non-professional tennis is not very attractive to follow for supporters of the players, be it sponsors or spectators, as there is no control of and little monitoring of the matches. This situation is even worse if the matches of a tournament are held at different locations rather than in an academy or federation. In this case, even the tournament direction receives the match results after the match. There is no possibility even for professional trainers to follow the scores if they are outside the court, be it from there lounge or over the Internet.
For these and other reasons, improvements in the general area of sporting performance and player data management are desirable.